What Drives Faculty Publication Citations in the Business Field? Empirical Results from an AACSB Middle Eastern Institution
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)
The topic is actual, but the results are less surprising. The question immediately arises from the results: why is it an interesting result that the Q1 articles receive the most citations and the Q4 articles the fewest? The number of citations in Scopus, but also the number of citations in SCImago, is the basis for the quality classification of the journals. In addition, the quality of the literary analysis, the research and the conclusions are outstanding and the study is suitable for publication.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
Following are my concerns:
1. What is the novelty of the paper.
2. The motivation behind the work is not clear.
3. Are authors keen to provide any solutions?
4. I found it a theoretical approach to presenting the existing problem.
5. Sample of the study is too short. It must be enhanced.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
Dear authors,
First of all I would like to congratulate you for the work you have developed and the article you have produced as a result of your research.
I would like to ask you to consider, if you haven't yet, the possibility to share the data of your research, especially the final table with doi to enable further research
I think the article can be published as it is but I would like to make some suggestions to improve the text and make it more clear.
Fist of all I would like to remark that I don't agree with the use of the terms "prestige" or "top" journals. I think we must avoid the spread of this idea that there are elite journals. I suggest to use other words or terms, and at least clarify what does it means (as you already do once in page 4, row 152)
When looking at the accessibility of the articles I have also some concerns because you mention open and closed journals but I don't know if you have considered the hybrid model. Since you are analysing citations I think it would be necesary also to analyse if some papers in closed journals get more citations because they are open though the hybrid option or iof tehre is an impact once the articles are publicly avalaible for marketing publiser reasons (the so called bronze option). Regarding this point, table 1 provides some data of the sample where papers are divided in two categories under publication format but I wonder if these categories should be expanded. In my opinion they should to reflect the variety of open access or public access options.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)
The paper is of good standard and well written.
Attached is a PDF file with 12 comments the authors will need to address.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
The paper does not provide any novelty, hence not accepted.
Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)
Suggested changes were undertaken by authors.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The text has, both scientific and current relevance, to be published in this prestigious journal. The objectives are well defined and the methodology is solid and consistent with the line of work.
Reviewer 2 Report
Thanks for the possibility to review this article. I do think it is interesting; however, it has several major flaws that need to be taken care of before it is published.
First, the introduction section needs to be adapted. I would recommend the authors to explicitly mention what the objective of the article is and what is the major contribution based on previous articles. I would also advise the authors the explicitly refer what the structure of the article is. Finally, what is the message on pages 3/4, lines 145-154. I assume the authors need to do some cleaning...
The References do not follow Administrative Sciences style. This needs to be taken care of.
The literature review section sometimes reads as if it were a methods section as it explains how the variables to be analyzed are measured. I do not find this follows proper academic rigor. I would recommend the authors to split up the literature review and the methods section.
Regarding the methods section, I would like to know why they used Google scholar to build their data set when the SCOPUS data database is tuned to that of SCIMAGO.
Page 8 lines 378-383. This procedure is more than arguable. If the analysis is on the paper and citations obtained, then whether the article belongs to Business or Economics should be based solely on the content of the article and not on what department the faculty belongs to. Moreover, if the paper is written by one from Economics and one from Business, how would you classify the paper?
The article needs to separate the Discussion section from the Conclusions section.
Section 5 is the weakest part of the article.
On page 14, lines 566-578, the conclusions are quite far-fetched. One cannot base his/her conclusions on this type of guessing. For example, the authors fail to separate the results from Business and Management and Economics/Econometrics according to quartiles. This could have given a more plausible explanation. Moreover, the article gives no single clue about the composition of the faculty, which is a quite limiting situation when analyzing outputs between different areas. Furthermore, do the authors know how many economics journals are there in the WoS/Scopus/Scimago databases when compared to Business and Management journals? Much more. Even more, for the same journal belonging to Economics/Econometrics and Business/Management, normally the best quartile and the best ranking is higher, for the same journal, when belonging to Economics/Econometrics than to Business/Management.
Another aspect: interdisciplinarity also occurs for Economics/Econometrics. It is not exclusive to the Business/Management area.
Open-access journals, apart from suffering from low reputation, are also more recent and are still in the growing up phase when compared to closed-access journals.
The generalizations for the population should be avoided as AKSOB is not representative of the population (I am sorry for being so blunt). As such, section 5.1 needs to be totally rewritten.
Some recommendations for collaboration seem to be far-fetched. It reads as 'let's collaborate' disregarding that, for example, those collaborations emerge over time, based on long-term projects, conferences and so on...
For example on page 16, lines 647-651 are somehow absurd. Are you telling those from economics that they should publish in management journals? Really? In many faculties, evaluations from different fields need publications in their own fields. The recommendations the authors are given might be interesting in the case study they analyzed. Generalizations to the population are dangerous...
Again, on page 16, lines 664-665, this type of management-centric perspective is very dangerous. I insist, do the authors know the number of economics/econometrics journals vis-à-vis business/management journals?
Reviewer 3 Report
The basis of one business school is important. There is no reason to expect these findings can be generalized.
The disciplines need to be separated out. Is economics combined with finance?
The citations; I am unclear on this, but how are self citations handled?
The author prestige measure is of dubious quality.
Why not develop a formal regression equation and estimate, reporting with robust standard errors?
The empirics are weak.
